The Serbian Army, once a skeleton of its former self, is now a roaring engine of vengeance, having completed one of the most harrowing military retreats in modern history to return as liberators. This is the story of a nation that refused to die, a journey through hell that ended in a stunning victory that reshaped the end of World War I. In the early days of the Great War in 1914, the Serbian Army achieved astonishing victories against the far larger Austro-Hungarian forces, but the tide turned with brutal finality in the fall of 1915.
A coordinated assault by nearly 800,000 soldiers from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria smashed into Serbia, overwhelming the exhausted and disease-ridden defenders. The Serbian high command devised a plan to withdraw to the Greek port of Salonika to link up with French and British allies, but the Bulgarian Army, in a treacherous move, cut off their path, leaving the Serbs trapped in Kosovo. With their backs to the frozen Albanian mountains and surrounded on three sides by overwhelming enemy forces, the Serbian leadership faced an impossible choice.
General Zivojin Misic proposed a desperate counter-attack against the Austro-German lines, but after a fierce and bitter argument among the generals, the plan was rejected. Only two options remained: surrender the remaining army or attempt a suicidal crossing of the Albanian mountains to the Adriatic Sea, where Allied ships might offer salvation. The decision was made.
They would not surrender. They would cross the freezing, treacherous peaks of Albania to reach the coast, where they hoped to regroup, rearm, and one day return to free their homeland. Little did they know that only half of the 400,000 people who began this journey would ever see the sea.
The retreat began with a heart-wrenching order: burn everything that could not be carried. Soldiers wept as they destroyed their cannons, grenades, and ammunition, throwing them into ravines or burying them in secret caches, praying they would return to reclaim them. One artillery unit, in a feat of superhuman will, dragged twenty cannons by hand over the mountain ranges, refusing to abandon their weapons.
Behind the army, a tide of civilians and refugees followed, their homes already torn apart by years of war. This was not a military maneuver; it was an exodus of an entire people, a desperate flight from an enemy that had shown no mercy. The journey was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions.
Constant attacks from Albanian groups, who did not support the Serbian cause, plagued the columns, while the Supreme Commander of the Albanian Army, Essad Pasha Toptani, an ally of Serbia, provided what little assistance he could. The majority of deaths, however, came from exhaustion and starvation. The soldiers and civilians had no proper clothing or equipment to face the harsh winter, with temperatures plunging to minus twenty degrees Celsius.
They navigated through two meters of snow, with no shelter and no food to be found. One soldier’s recollection captures the horror: “You could 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 without consequence, die without anyone noticing. The roadside was littered with horse skeletons.
We were so desperate that some tried to cook and eat military leather bags. If you stop to rest and try to sleep in the snow, you’d freeze to death. I came upon a group of soldiers huddled around a dying fire, but when I tried to speak to them, there was no reply.
They had all frozen to death in the very position they had taken to rest.” Out of the 400,000 people who set out, only 120,000 soldiers and 60,000 civilians reached the Adriatic Coast. But reaching the shore was not the end of their agony; it was the beginning of a new nightmare.
Allied ships carrying vital food and clothing could not enter the shallow Albanian ports, and the Italian forces, also allies, viewed the Serbian Army with suspicion, treating them as little better than the enemy. Austro-Hungarian submarines and aircraft prevented any approach to the coast, with Austrian pilots using the new technology of the time to drop bombs on the retreating columns in what has been termed the first aerial bombardment of civilians. A new long march awaited the exhausted army, spanning 240 more kilometers through cold and rain to the Albanian city of Durazzo.
There, the remnants of the army that survived this terrible exodus were transported to the Greek island of Corfu in January 1916. Just over 100,000 soldiers managed to reach the island, but their initial days on Corfu were horrific. The Allies were not prepared to receive such a large number of people.
There was not enough food, clothing, heating, or tent equipment. The soldiers, exhausted from the grueling march, continued to die in mass on Corfu. The worn and tormented army endured icy rain for seven days under the open sky, without fences or shelter.
Poor people who had literally eaten nothing for a month suddenly consumed a large amount of food, 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 their exhausted bodies and leading to mass deaths once again. Seeing this, the Allies had to carefully administer food to them little by little to gradually revive their bodies. The most critically wounded and sick, mainly the youngest soldiers, practically kids aged 17 to 19 who were most affected by the retreat, were disembarked on the island of Vido from January 23rd to March 23rd, 1916.
On the small island of Vido, near Corfu, which was organized as a hospital, 4,847 people died. The island turned into an island of death, and the sea around it became a blue tomb. Without the possibility of burial, about 5,400 deceased were lowered into the sea.
Out of respect and reverence for the fallen Serbian soldiers, Greek fishermen refrained from fishing in that area for the next 50 years. But then, the huge turnaround came, something that no one ever expected. Following the horrifying trials and losses, the Serbian Army on the island of Corfu started slowly healing both physically and spiritually.
Despite the initial hardships they faced upon their arrival, the resilient spirit of the Serbian people, with aid from their allies, started pulling them back from death. As days turned to weeks and weeks to months, the skeletal army transformed. They slowly regained their strength, fed and clothed adequately, and treated with the utmost care to bring them back from the brink of death.
Through painstaking efforts, they were reorganized and rejuvenated, their will and determination to fight once more restored. Training regimes were reintroduced, forging them into a formidable force ready to reclaim what was lost and to pay back the enemy. In the spring of 1918, the rejuvenated Serbian Army was prepared to take the leading role in a major offensive that would echo through history.
Spearheading the Allied forces, they broke through the Bulgarian-held Thessaloniki front. Their anger, built with years of concentrated suffering, brought devastation to the Bulgarian and German lines, breaking them with an iron will that spoke of their hardships, their losses, and their burning desire for home. The Serbian forces pushed on relentlessly.
The desperate, starving, and frostbitten soldiers who had trekked across the Albanian mountains were no more. Now, a well-fed, well-equipped, and unstoppable force sprinted towards their homeland. Then, in a remarkable turn of events, the unimaginable happened.
Serbia was free. Through cities and villages they marched, greeted by citizens with tears of joy and cheers of relief. The roads were lined with people in disbelief as they witnessed their heroic army, which everyone had told had been annihilated, returning as liberators.
An army forged in the most horrific conditions had overcome the impossible, making the enemy pay in blood for every life lost, for every hardship endured. It was a miraculous turnaround, a testament to the human spirit’s power to overcome, to reclaim, and to triumph. An epic end to an epic journey.
